This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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A Rock Opera About The Holocaust? Yes, Really.
Jeremy Schonfeld didn’t exactly intend to create a multimedia rock opera about the Shoah and the emotional trauma it inflicted across generations. All he wanted to do was write an album in honor of his father, Gustav Schonfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz who passed away in 2011. Yet, according to Schonfeld, the result of this…
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Theater Did Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize Help Him Win Over Marilyn Monroe?
On May 2, 1949, Arthur Miller, then 33, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Death of a Salesman.” It was one of several remarkable moments in what was, for Miller, a remarkable year. “Death of a Salesman” swept up most of the season’s available theatrical awards, including the Tony Award for Best Author,…
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Film & TV Leonard Bernstein To Be Portrayed By Jake Gyllenhaal In New Biopic
The year of Leonard Bernstein’s centenary, already widely celebrated, just got even better: Jake Gyllenhaal, your Serious Jewish Actor crush, is going to play Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic. As Deadline reports, Gyllenhaal will produce and star in “The American,” which will begin filming this coming fall from a screenplay by Michael Mitnick, adapted from…
The Latest
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A Good Man Is Hard To Find (At A Jewish Youth Convention)
When I worked at a Jewish summer camp, I developed a philosophy of dating that I based on a Jewish sports game called gaga. Gaga is a primitive ball-based game that takes place in a pit and involves maneuvering a rubber ball to hit other players in the shins or feet (they’ve never, ever let…
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How The Vilna Troupe Took Yiddish Theater Global
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
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‘Mean Girls,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Angels In America’ Lead Tony Nominations
After a particularly boring season on Broadway, there are few surprises among this season’s nominees for the Tony Awards. “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Mean Girls” predictably mopped up nominations, scoring 12 apiece in a season in which new musicals were scarce. Equally predictably, “Escape to Margaritaville,” the Jimmy Buffet musical, won no Tony love; somewhat more…
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Israel’s Security At 70 — Laura E. Adkins In Conversation With Danny Yatom
Laura E. Adkins, deputy opinion editor of the Forward will be appearing in conversation with Major General (ret.) Danny Yatom, the eighth director of the Mossad (1996-98). The event will take place at Bnai Jeshurun on Wednesday May 2. Yatom served as deputy commander of the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, military secretary under Defense…
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Theater Is Israel’s Most Famous Playwright Too Political For His Own Country?
In 1985, “Palestinian Girl,” a drama by Joshua Sobol, Israel’s most famous and prolific living playwright, premiered in the Haifa Theater. A story about a love affair between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman whose relationship is being destroyed by right-wing thugs, the play was controversial, but a huge success. This was a few…
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How This Bible Got To Jerusalem — And Other Secrets Of Gershom Scholem’s Library
If you have ever wanted to visit the private library of a major intellectual, the place to be is Jerusalem, where Gershom Scholem’s personal library — along with the desk he wrote on — lives inside a room at the National Library of Israel. The space is homey, and feels a bit like a private…
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The Strange-But-True Story Of A Mossad-Run ‘Dive Resort’ In Muslim Sudan
It was one of the Mossad’s most daring, complex and longest-running operations. But only now, 37 years on, is the story of a Red Sea diving resort run by the agency getting its moment in the sun. “Operation Brothers,” which ran for over three years in the early 1980s, was a breathtaking mission. At its…
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Include Ilana Kurshan, Yair Mintzker
The finalists for the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, announced today, are Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement,” Shari Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yair Mintzker’s “The Many Deaths of Jew…
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